Local teens graduate from NCSSM, ready for next challenge

Saturday

Aug 17, 2013 at 3:00 AM

In a few days, Vlad Yefremov of Hendersonville will be knee-deep in freshman classes at UNC-Chapel Hill. After spending two years at Hendersonville High then graduating from the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics, Yefremov is more than ready to start his college career.

By NANCY TANKERTimes-News Staff Writer

In a few days, Vlad Yefremov of Hendersonville will be knee-deep in freshman classes at UNC-Chapel Hill. After spending two years at Hendersonville High then graduating from the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics, Yefremov is more than ready to start his college career.“I’m going to major in biology with a chemistry minor and philosophy minor as well,” he said. “At NCSSM I took eight biology classes. I love neurology, so to be a neurologist would be amazing, or a biomedical engineer. That’s a really wide field — you make basically anything that deals with human anatomy. A heart valve would be a good example. I love stem cell research, too.”Yefremov, 18, didn’t graduate from a typical high school. Located in Durham, NCSSM is a two-year junior/senior residential high school with an intensive course of study designed to give students a solid grounding in science, mathematics, language arts, history and a world language. Classes often include research in the laboratory and at advanced computer facilities.The application process for the school is highly competitive. A selection committee made up of technology leaders and educators from across the state considers each applicant’s interest in science and math, and reviews standardized test scores, past academic performance, special talents, accomplishments and extracurricular activities. There are a limited number of enrollment spaces — about 340 per class.If accepted, students move onto the school’s Durham campus to begin an intensive course of study and learn how to manage themselves as if they were going to college.Yefremov and three other students from Henderson County recently graduated from the school. “NCSSM definitely prepared me for UNC-Chapel Hill — very much so,” Yefremov said. NCSSM “gives you a lot of freedom, but at the same time it still has the safeguards. Aside from the curfews, you have to manage your own time and you’re on your own. I found that difficult at first, but now I definitely have it down. After a trimester or two, everybody nails it down.”NCSSM classmate Jaeyoung Yoo, also from Hendersonville and about to begin her freshman year at UNC-Chapel Hill, said she felt a similar sense of college readiness thanks to her experiences at NCSSM. “I already know how living in a dorm works and how to contact my professors for help and get myself to tutoring sessions,” she said. “NCSSM had very strict curfew rules. They would turn off the Internet at 1 a.m., which was good because some people were on the Internet late into the night, then they would start their homework, which would really hurt their performance. We didn’t have our parents to tell us to get off the internet, so we had to develop some self-control.”After traveling to South Korea for several weeks over the summer to visit family she hasn’t seen since leaving the country with her parents at age 6, Yoo, now 19, said she is “really excited to be meeting new people and to be studying again” at UNC. “I kind of missed that.”She will be taking classes in philosophy, geography, chemistry, education and Japanese. Yoo already has two years of the language under her belt thanks to NCSSM. Her major is undecided for now, but her minors are Japanese and entrepreneurship. In terms of a future career, Yoo said, “I don’t have a passion yet, but I’m currently thinking of dentistry. My sister is in the dental school here at UNC-Chapel Hill. I like the ability to fix someone’s smile and their first impression and having healthy teeth.” Her sister also graduated from NCSSM.While Yoo is chomping at the bit to get back to school, fellow NCSSM grad Allison Pfotzer, 18, of Hendersonville is ready to take a year off before starting her freshman year at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. on a scholarship. “I’m going to be living in Spain starting in September, as a nanny for three children, ages 8, 6 and 3,” she said.Pfotzer said she wants to experience the Spanish culture, travel and take Spanish lessons. She already knows some Swahili, having spent two months over the last summer in Kenya, where she taught primary school and worked at a medical clinic. “It was an incredible experience; I can’t describe it,” she said. “My favorite part was the Kenyan people, other volunteers, people I met along the way, and the children. Plus, you meet people who are very likeminded and they make change happen.“One thing I did with another volunteer from Portugal is that we raised $1,000 in a week to make a chicken coop for the school. The school can get revenue from the chicken’s eggs and have protein for the kids.” The revenue was earmarked for a well pump and running electricity to the well, which the village was still working on when Pfotzer returned to the U.S.Born and raised in England, she moved to the U.S. at age 11 and attended Rugby Middle School. “My family is all from Green River, so I’m the exception for being out of the country,” she said. “My grandmother’s from Tuxedo.”After two years at West Henderson High, Pfotzer was lured to NCSSM by the promise of “more rigorous academics.”“I was kind of running out of classes to take at West and I loved the idea of living away from home,” she said. “I had gone to boarding when I was little in England and living at NCSSM is like attending college early, except with a couple more rules because we’re all underage. It was a fantastic experience I wish everyone could have.”At NCCSM, Pfotzer studied eating disorders in the school’s research lab. “We had a program for anorexics to help them use an app to track food intake and their moods and urges to binge or purge. They can log the urges using the app — and if they fulfilled or fought the urge and the strategy they used.”Her favorite classes were immunology and a Latin American history class, but she’s not sure yet of her career direction. After returning from Spain to attend Georgetown, she’s interested in taking “a lot of liberal arts seminars and get acquainted with an array of subjects. I’m also interested in the fact that Georgetown has the only student-led bank. I’d like to look into that and see if I’m interested in business management. They have some amazing international business courses” at Georgetown. Looking back at her time at NCSSM, Pfotzer said the school “really changed my life. It made me really grow up. They have a lot of vision in their youth. They really challenge you. You think you’re going to break but instead you grow, so you can go out into the world and change things.”Back at UNC-Chapel Hill, another NCSSM grad, John Coletta, 17, is also unsure of his career path, but added, “I figure that’s what college is for — to figure out what I want to do. But I’ve always been interested in math. It’s very useful.”Coletta, from Flat Rock, said he learned about NCSSM when a representative came to Hendersonville High to give a presentation. Coletta was intrigued about the school “because of the opportunity it provides and the academic environment. It opens up a lot of doors to do research in high school. A lot of professors there have their doctorates and know other professors in other nearby colleges that we can also talk to. The school also offered classes that aren’t available at a regular high school, like multivariable calculus.”Living away from home was “an experience I very much enjoyed because it offers a slightly higher degree of freedom even though there were still rules we had to follow. It was a positive experience that helped prepare me for the independence you experience in college — having to do laundry, clean your room and eat.“Everybody there had to apply to get in, so everybody was pretty serious about their academic performance, so it’s an environment where you’re constantly challenged — not only by your professors but by your peers — to achieve things that you might not have thought you could do.”Today Coletta is headed to UNC-Chapel Hill’s Honors College as a Colonel Robinson Scholar, which “pretty much covers my tuition” for four years. “Chapel Hill has a beautiful campus and there are more new people to meet and new professors,” he said. “I’m excited.”Yefremov couldn’t agree more. “When you apply to college you have an open field in terms of where you want to go,” he said. “But now that you’re in college, you have an open field in terms of what you want to do with your life. That to me is a lot more exciting proposition.”Reach Tanker at 828-694-7871 or nancy.tanker@blueridgenow.com.

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